The Department of Homeland Security is recruiting with a new trope, same as the old trope.
I was never into Halo, but my sons were avid players. I just wasn’t good enough to join in, but I remember the Flood from the many battles waged into the wee hours of the night in my basement. I had to look them up to remind myself of what the Flood were.
The Flood, designated as LF.Xx.3273 by the Forerunners (Latin Inferi redivivus meaning “the dead reincarnated”) and referred to as the Parasite and the infection by the Covenant, is a species of highly virulent parasitic organisms that reproduce and grow by consuming sentient lifeforms of sufficient biomass and cognitive capability. The Flood was responsible for consuming most of the sentient lifeforms in the galaxy – including the vast majority of Forerunners – during the Forerunner-Flood war in ancient past, prompting the activation of the galaxy-sterilizing Halo Array in 97,445 BCE.
Cool. Comparing immigrants to virulent parasitic organisms and threatening to literally destroy them. This is exactly what Julius Streicher would do if he were reincarnated today and was trying to enlist young men to his cause.
The Flood do look like they’d make excellent farm laborers, but they don’t resemble the Central and South American people I know.
Way to make Larry Niven’s Ringworld look absurdly too small ICE fascists..
Oh and the Flood** still manage to look better than Trump does. /Catty mode.*
Halo? Far as I know that’s a safety feature in F1 cars. Anyhow..
.* Unfair to felines but anyhow..
.** Don’t look that liquid~ish to me..
Microsoft is silent as Trump co-opts Halo — but these Halo developers aren’t.
From Wikipedia:
“After the war, Streicher was convicted of crimes against humanity during the Nuremberg trials. Specifically, he was found to have continued his vitriolic antisemitic propaganda when he was well aware that Jews were being murdered. For this, he was executed by hanging. Streicher was the first member of the Nazi regime held accountable for inciting genocide by the Nuremberg Tribunal.”
O, that the same fate would befall the perpetrator of ICE.
You would think that Nazi-adjacent appeals to video game players would fall flat on their fact, given that Nazis are one of the few uncomplicated video game baddies left. If you’re shooting things with reckless abandon and no moral qualms it pretty much has to be orcs, zombies or Nazis, or some variant thereon.
Then again, when you staff your administration entirely with orcs, zombies and Nazis, or some variant thereon (Stephen Miller is definitely all three), you probably won’t realise this.
The Onion just had a message on a video saying that Stephen Miller was uninjured after an attempted staking.
@ 4
Never underedtimste the fascist’s desire to appropriate anti-right-wing art and culture and try to twist and rewrite it to suit their purposes.
Just yesterday, I read a post on a FB Babylon 5 fan page that said how the show’s depiction of the rise of of fascism in the Earth Alliance eerily parody’s current events. The majority of the comments were from MAGA chuds claiming that it was Biden and the Democrats who filled the role of President Clark and his allies while Trump and MAGA were the equivalent of Sheridan an the Army of Light.
Fascist can never create, they can only steal while claiming it was theirs all along.
Edit: …eerily paralleled…
i think a more apt comparison is the ICE is the Flood, and we all have to take the fight to THEM.
re Akira MacKenzie @6: Those MAGAts either have comprehension issues or are simply trolling. Or probably both.
I had no idea who the Flood were.
I’ve heard of Halo but that is about it.
I even have a tie in science fiction book someone gave me that I’ve never read.
They need an ad with more identifiable enemies.
.1. Something with Zombies like The Walking Dead TV show.
Although who are the Zombies here and who are the refugees is going to be hard for people to sort out.
ICE and the GOP have a lot more in common with the Zombies.
.2. The obvious one.
Remember the Alamo.
We all know what their real targets are and a main group comes from south of the border and speaks Spanish.
.3. The Crusaders.
Liberating the Holy Land from the Pagans, Infidels, Muslims, DEIs, Democrats, and Wokes.
.4. Witches.
The GOP is now embarking on a massive witch hunt so it is relevant.
.5. I’m sure they can find something from the old USSR to repurpose.
The enemies of the Soviets were Trotskyites, class enemies, and enemies of the people. Whatever those are.
These days it is Antifa, whatever that is.
There is really nothing new here. It’s the same old dictatorship stuff in a new uniform.
I’m just going to put this here because it is related.
Someone I know was just indicted by the Federal Government.
For more or less no reason whatsoever.
It’s all on video anyway.
This is a pure harassment charge and will probably get thrown out of court.
Most of the people arrested by ICE and the Feds at demonstrations are either never charged or have their cases thrown out in court.
I know one example where someone was charged with impeding law enforcement.
The video showed a police officer in a car trying to run her over.
I can’t believe they haven’t co-opted the execrable Starship Troopers (aka Young Nazis in Love) by Paul Verhoeven who also gave us slop like Showgirls.
I think Verhoeven meant it as satire.
.
In the image they look like the Somalian mercenaries driving “technicals”. Odd choice for a recruitment ad.
.
When the MAGA warriors want to get tough…
.https://www.facebook.com/share/19VAJc4jdM/
Highly virulent parasites reproducing by consuming sentient beings. The Flood sounds a lot like ICE to me.
@6 Well the analogy breaks down when you realize that MAGA is lead by a draft dodger whose adherents are generally dim-witted trolls who can’t shoot worth a damn.
To wit:
-Butler, PA shooter–disaffected former MAGA who failed to kill intended target but did manage to kill several MAGA supporters
-FL golf course would be shooter–caught before ever managing to get his intended target within his gunsight, caught & arrested by Secret Service agents
-Mar-A-Lago hunter stand with clear line of sight on airstrip disembarkation point–still not caught
-Has-been entertainer/trust fund baby attempts to shoot case of Bud Light in a fit of transphobic rage, fails to land a shot, beer is shot from the side by off camera shooter, nepo baby makes video of his execrable shooting
-Jan. 6 asshats, including the one who shot out his own eye in a gun-cleaning accident. Apparently no one told him not to look into the business end of a firearm.
@13 It did not come off as satire.
“I think Verhoeven meant it as satire.”
“It did not come off as satire.”
It was intended to be satirical, according to him. Or so he claims.
But what he was supposedly satirising is definitely not Heinlein’s book.
Reputedly, he couldn’t even be fucked reading the book: “I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring… It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn’t read it.”
I reckon that seems a bit apocryphal, but for fucking sure the movie is in no way analogous to the actual book, it’s entirely different. Totally misses the point, and totally ignores the big hook of the power armor where every Trooper is tougher than a tank and can throw tactical nukes around like confetti.
(He went for WW2 infantry instead, because… well, not the book)
I’ve gone on about it here in the past, if you care to try to dispute me about it, go for it.
But no. The movie is like the book much as the movie I, Robot was like the book.
If you care, I can go into detail as to how he fucked up Heinlein’s conceit that voting rights should be earned; that is, subject to “proof of work” before being available. And the film makes it look like such service is military or fascistic, but the book makes it clear it’s about voting power being reserved for those who have proven their civic virtue, and that many service roles are non-combat.
Hitler Fan Fights Patrons Outside Georgia Bar … Man Arrested For Assault, Battery
Gotta love the reporting there, Reginald. Quite slanted.
“As you can see … several patrons standing around him are fuming over his costume, made even more offensive by his arm band emblazoned with a Nazi symbol.”
It’s part of the costume. cf. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gestapo_room_Lofoten_Krigsminnemuseum_WWII_museum_Norway._Office_Nazi_Germany_swastika_flag_Reichskriegsflagge_SS_uniforms_SD_Unterscahrfuehrer_Leather_coat_armband_Signal_magazine_phone_heater_RAD_clock_handcuffs_baton_etc_2022_IMG_81.jpg
@1 The Halo rings are considerably smaller than the Larry Niven Ringworld. They also do not orbit a central star.
@ 9
At this point, I can’t tell anymore.
@ 13
It’s from the game.
https://www.halopedia.org/Warthog
@17. John Morales :
Wow. I hadn’t heard that. That is appalling on Paul Verhoeven’s part.
The novel is certianly totally different and I enjoyed reading it a s akid so strongly disagree with Verhoeven here. Of cours eI rea dof lot of heinlein, Clarke and Asimov and was into that so am biased but still.
I got that it was satirical but I think a lot of people didn’t – a perennial isue with satire me gnerally. I guess how it coems across depedns on the viewer / reader.. which si outside the author’s control.
Yeah. Similarly, I don’t think Jonathon Swift really intended that the Irish should eat their babies.
Are you actually serious? How much more obvious does it need to be? Does it need to have a big red flashing banner saying “THIS IS SATIRE” or something? I mean, it’s not like it was particularly subtle.
I’ve occasionally heard claims that some people didn’t get it, but I never really believed it until now… We really are dealing with a crisis of media literacy, aren’t we?
Dunc, #23,
It seemed pretty obvious to me that the film was intended as a(n unsubtle) satire of fascistic militarism, but satire is notoriously unsuccessful in crossing cultures. I have often had to teach Roman satires, primarily Horace and Juvenal. Even the scholarly community, while agreed that a work called “Satires” is definitely full of satire, is never quite sure what exactly it is satirising.
The problem is that you can never be quite sure what level you’re supposed to be engaging on. Juvenal’s sixth satire, for instance, is filled with egregious examples of women’s sexual misbehaviour and general wickedness, but it’s framed from the perspective of a grumpy old Roman man declaiming that there aren’t any decent women to marry anymore. Are we supposed to sympathise with this man, and therefore take the work as a as a satire on the morals of modern Roman women, or are we supposed to see this man as a fuddy-duddy old curmudgeon with a lively imagination, in which case we have a satire on the sort of people who bang on about the decline of modern morals and imagine ever more lurid slippery slopes for society to fall down. It works either way. I am sure a late 1st Century Roman would have had enough cultural clues from the text to be able to work out which way Juvenal intended it to go, but lacking that precise cultural mindset we can only speculate.
Admittedly Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers film is not so culturally distant as a two thousand year old comic poem in another language. My guess would be that to someone with his cultural background – a Dutchman born in the 1930s who grew up under Nazi occupation with fascist propaganda – the satire of fascistic militarism is blatant and excessive. To an American audience in the late 90s steeped in an aesthetic of try-hard militarism not too distinct from that of the fascists, it might have been less clear.
@23: Yes, we really are. Recently learned that some right wingers have watched Babylon 5’s arc involving the fascist takeover of Earth and compared it to Biden’s administration.
@ ^ Recursive Rabbit : Oh you have got to be shitting me!!? Seriously? For Fucks Sake!
Fashy recruitment using Halo is cute. I wonder who their target audience is, though. People my age who remember playing the game? We’re pusing 40 — at the very least from a physical perspective, I don’t think we would make good ICE thugs.
The target audience is seemingly kids who don’t remember playing the game and have other vidya with far better graphics to compare it to.
Maybe a higher-up in DHS had nothing else to do during the shutdown and finished another playthrough of itThe marketing logic is baffling.Also, white “inferi redivivus” could be translated as “the dead reincarnated”, that rather overlooks the strong sense “inferi” has of the wicked and demonic. It literally means “those below”, so perhaps just the souls of the dead, but more likely the souls of the damned, and/or the demons that go with them. “redivivus” is just “brought back to life”, which is close to “reincarnated” but the latter literally means “given flesh once more”. I’d prefer something closer to “the damned brought back to life”.
and, of course, “inferi” is plural, so it should really be “redivivi”
ICE is also using scenes from Lord of the Rings with captions of Merry trying to convince Pippin to join ICE in order to “save the Shire.” Somehow, I doubt Tolkien would approve.
And it’s running recruitment ads on Spotify, which is a good reason to boycott that platform if you ask me.
Also, if anyone wants to read a good satire of Starship Troopers, I strongly recommend Bill The Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison.
@ 30
Who can say? Tolkein was primitivist who had a distrust of political power. He hated Churchill but was an anti-feminist. That said, I’m certain Peter Thiel popped a massive (well, relatively speaking) boner when that ad dropped.
Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War” also takes a critical view of Heinlein’s jingoism complete with power armor and inscrutable alien opponents.
I don’t care how Verhoeven intended Starship Troopers, it was just plain bad.
Every ICE recruitment ad I have seen is aimed at half-wit psychopaths.
I did not see the film as I had watched excerpts showing the awful CGI aliens. Jeez.
.
In regard to the recruitment ad… it is aimed at the demographic that think a swearing bullying dullard is cool, because he dislikes the people they dislike. By this time they are aware he lies a lot but they do not care. Quote:
” For propaganda to be successful, it has to be aimed at the least intelligent segment of the population.”
Goebbels.
That ad was just plain confusing. I knew about Halo but never played it because I stopped being into first person shooters before it came out.
So my initial thought was what is this picture trying to tell me about Niven’s Ringworld and where are the puppeteers, kzin, and ringworld engineers? And it really just went downhill from there.
Once the Flood was explained I remained confused. We’re stamping out parasites? Which end are we starting at? Are we hitting it from the top down and going after parasites like Musk first or are we aiming to clear out the small fingered, grubby little weasels like Trump first?
Then I realized they were trying to imply something about immigrants. You know, people who go through the enormous effort to pick up and move themselves, their families, and everything they own to a new place. I’ve done that within the US and that’s a lot of work. Crossing country borders while doing it is just a whole extra layer of stuff to deal with on top of that. The only way to be a parasite while doing something like this would require an embarrassment of riches to back you up. Normal people can’t survive pulling a stunt like that.
I’m thinking The Purge and they’re thinking “Haha, haha, immigrants amiright?” I’m still struggling to imagine the sort of clueless gomer they’d be after with this sort of ad. Adult gamers that still live in their parents’ basement, maybe?
The most correct version of MAGA would be the San’Shyuum, latin meaning “worms of treachery”. Its unclear now many really “believed” in the lie that the rings where not weapons, but instead gate ways to some “great journey to paradise”, its fairly certain that the leaders where truly “worms of treachery”, knew exactly what the truth was, and intended to us a forerunner “shield world” they had discovered to save themselves, and those they conned into following them, from the coming erasure of all sentient life in the universe. This only become more of a thing after discovering that humanity either, depending on if you are talking about the early games, or the newer ones, where they expanded the lore and changed this key detail, “Are forerunners”, or merely, “Those chosen by the forerunner Librarian to be the race to reclaim their legacy.
Honestly, on that bit of rewrite I kind of side with the rewrite. Its rather unclear how you have humanity “be” the forerunners, and then somehow explain how they lost every single member of the species, 100% of all their technology, and got reduced to the state of primitives, on some world they seemingly originated on, based on biological evidence, and not wiped out entirely, like 99% of almost all of the forerunners who where alive at the time the weapons where fired the first time did… The “old version” has hole you could fly a fleet of ships through.
But, yeah, Trump, and the freaks who a) helped in get there, and/or b) he has appointed, are very treacherous, often religious fanatics, and even when not, only give a shit about keeping enough people alive so they still have enough morons to guard, and do the dirty work, like serving hamburgers to them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for them. Everyone else, they would likely be totally happy to have wiped out by a super weapon, if they could get by with it, while selling their “followers” and making a “great journey”.
Actually, the above is not “exactly” accurate. Seems that they may have, at some point, due to mistranslation, and their obsession with interpreting everything as they “wanted it to be”, instead of as it really was, and the like, they actually convinced themselves that the platforms where a means to ascension, and part of the issue with humanity showing up was the idea that humans where “degenerate forerunners, who failed to ascend.”, suggesting a major problem with their theology that “all beings can ascend”, or something like that. But, it just makes them even more like freaking Evangelicals, racists, and our MAGA fascists.
“Also, if anyone wants to read a good satire of Starship Troopers, I strongly recommend Bill The Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison.”
Seconded.
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Smashers_of_the_Galaxy_Rangers does the same for ‘Doc’ Smith.
(for me, it’s perfection)
—
Akira,
I can say; I’ve read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scouring_of_the_Shire
John @37: Among the many horrible choices Peter Jackson made in his films (I know we disagree on some), leaving out The Scouring of the Shire was one of the worst. It was, arguably, the whole point of the story.
Trump Chief Stephen Miller’s Wife Explicitly Threatens Cenk Uygur’s Citizenship in Shocking On-Air Meltdown
Speaking of vermin
Multiple sex scandals are rocking the MAGA faith community
Seconding #31 Akira MacKenzie’s recomendation :
here.
Adding Slaughterhouse 5 to that too.
By Kurt Vonnegut :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five
^WARNING : SPOILERS.. Guessing no one minds but still..
[OT]
StevoR @41, I disagree. As does the author himself. Word of God.
He didn’t like the militarism in ST, but TFW was not a parody or a critical view of it other than thematically.
(And the powered armor was nothing like Heinlein’s, nor was it central, and the Skinnies were not inscrutable at all. Don’t go by the movie!)
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War#Connection_to_Starship_Troopers
↓ [My emphasis:]
“Haldeman has stated that The Forever War is a result of his experiences in the Vietnam War, although he has also said that he was influenced by Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.[6][2][1] Haldeman said that he disagreed with Starship Troopers because it “glorifies war” but added that “it’s a very well-crafted novel and I believe Heinlein was honest with it”.[6]
The Forever War contains several parallels to Starship Troopers, including its setting and the powered armor that Heinlein’s novel first popularized. Commentators have described it as a reaction to Heinlein’s novel, a suggestion Haldeman denies; the two novels are very different in terms of their attitude towards the military. The Forever War does not depict war as a noble pursuit, with the sides clearly defined as good and evil; instead, the novel explores the dehumanizing effect of war, influenced by the real-world context of the Vietnam War.[7]
Heinlein wrote a letter to Haldeman, congratulating Haldeman on his Nebula Award; Haldeman has said that Heinlein’s letter “meant more than the award itself”.[8] According to author Spider Robinson, Heinlein approached Haldeman at the awards banquet and said the book “may be the best future war story I’ve ever read!”[9] “
@23 Peter Sellers does satire (The Mouse That Roared), the Coen brothers do satire (The Hudsucker Proxy, among others), Stanley Kubrick does satire (Dr. Strangelove with Sellers), Blomkamp’s District Nine was billed as a SF action movie but was a sharp and scathing satire of African apartheid, Jordan Peele’s Get Out is satire (although he calls it a documentary). Paul Verhoeven does tedious movies that consist mostly of gratuitous fanservice female nudity and not a whole lot else. (Exhibit A: Basic Instinct and Showgirls.) Robocop actually landed as satire but I never thought it was more than middling, despite the cult following that it has. I can well believe that Verhoeven didn’t read Heinlein’s book–other than the name, there is literally no similarity–but the movie landed (with the same dull thud as a dead pigeon hitting the pavement) as ham-handed xenophobia coupled with fannish fascist military glorification, a lot of pointless fanservice female nudity and no likable characters. Verhoeven may have intended it as satire (or hid behind that excuse for a truly tedious box office bomb) but it’s worth remembering that intentions aren’t magic. This asshat undoubtedly though his big speech would land differently too.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/oct/20/lost-us-generals-senior-officers-say-trust-hegseth-evaporated/
It’s worth noting that when a right wing rag like The Washington Times pans the Secretary of War (or Wannabe Posers in Kegsbreath’s case) you are deep in the weeds.
@31 I loved Haldeman’s Forever War, it took away all the bad taste in my mouth from reading Starship Troopers. I was never a Heinlein fan; I started with Friday, followed with Starship Troopers and quit reading Heinlein after Farnham’s Freehold. Christ. How did that ever get greenlit for publication. (I was always more of a Zelazny fan.)
@38 Agreed. While it’s still the best adaptation to date, I still remember the pit in my stomach when I got advance news that the Scouring of the Shire had been cut. Was overjoyed that Tom Bombadil had been cut (yes, I know some people are Bombadil fans, I am not one of them) but yeah, the whole point of the entire book is that true heroism is picking up the pieces after fighting the good fight and living lives of purpose and kindness. Instead, it gets cut down to a sad ship-boarding scene with Annie Lennox singing. (Not a criticism of Lennox, she was the perfect choice.) wtf
@ 31 Akira
That’s a pretty cheap shot to take at Tolkien. Given that he was a white, Christian male born in the 1890s (in South Africa, no less), he undoubtedly had many beliefs and attitudes that I would not agree with, but I think it is more revealing to look at the ways in which he was ahead of his time. In 1938, when antisemitism was more the rule than the exception, he was willing to risk losing a publishing deal for a German translation of The Hobbit rather than be seen as supporting what he called “the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine” of the Nazis. As for being an “anti-feminist,” while I am sure many of his attitudes towards women were rather sexist by current standards, it is worth noting that, although he was obviously more comfortable writing about male characters, he made efforts to portray female characters as their equal. From the moment Galadriel and Celeborn are introduced in the LoTR, it is clear that Celeborn is the one who married up. And just in case Eowyn taking on the Witch-king didn’t make it obvious, Gandalf flat-out says to Eomer, “she, born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours.” In his notes on Elven culture, Tolkien also explains that, while there are some occupations among the Eldar that are done primarily by men, there are none that are exclusive to men, and that women could be found in every sphere of occupation among the Eldar (including the military). Kind of an odd take on gender roles for an “anti-feminist.”
It is also worth noting that some of his notes on Elven culture during the war against Morgoth make it clear that torture was considered an evil act, even if it were done ostensibly to obtain information that could potentially save lives. Perhaps someone should point out to all the neocons claiming to be Tolkien fans that Tolkien both anticipated and repudiated their justification for “enhanced interrogation techniques” decades ago.